Best Practices

How to Celebrate Entrepreneurs with National Small Business Week

National Small Business Week is the perfect time to connect with your community's small business owners and startups and to shine a light on the resources available to start and grow a business.

Use the buzz of national events to host collaborative events connecting your startups and small businesses. Create collisions by bringing together your entrepreneurs and aspiring business owners together to exchange ideas and introduce partnerships. These events can be official like a 1 Million Cups or Startup Weekend, or your organization can host a coffee and networking hour with a Resource Partner.

This is how one of our affiliate partners is bringing their business owners together and rallying entrepreneurship.

Loudoun Small Business Week

Loudoun County, Virginia, already knows National Small Business Week is an opportunity to celebrate its entrepreneurs and connect them with resources; however, they wanted to make their celebration of entrepreneurship local and personal.

Every year, Virginia's Loudoun Economic Development and its partners hold an after-party and celebrate Small Business Week the week after the national recognition.

The first day kicks off with a day-long conference then the rest of the week is filled with panel discussions, workshops, awards programs and social hours designed to educate, connect and celebrate the region’s small business community.

Send us a message to learn more about our tools and resources to promote your community's celebrations.

Pola Firestone is the relationship manager and affiliate liaison for SourceLink. Through her outreach work, she has a window into the challenges of building entrepreneurial ecosystems, and uses that knowledge to help inform new products and solutions to the SourceLink network

Research & Toolkits

Interested in learning more? Reach out to Dara Macan and tell us what you are excited about in your community; we'd love to learn from your expertise and feature you as one of our forward-thinking leaders in our emerging industry.

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